Dr. Hinshaw’s Memoir is out!

July 7, 2017

We’re proud to share that CREST network member Dr. Stephen Hinshaw’s memoir, “Another Kind of Madness” was just released. It’s a story about Dr. Hinshaw’s personal experiences with stigma, family, and mental illness — much of what drives his passion as a mental health researcher today. Author Ford Madox Ford recommended that readers “open the book to page 99 and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you”, and Dr. Hinshaw applied the “Page 99 Test” to his own book (click on the link to read page 99!).

Here is photo of Dr. Hinshaw at the San Francisco book launch, as well as a small excerpt of the book (from the larger excerpt featured by Salon). We know you’ll love it as much as we do.

Dad and I were alone in the house.

“Son,” he began in a quiet voice, his eyes avoiding mine. He used the formal term when things were serious, a remnant of his Quaker upbringing. “Could we talk for a bit?”

Placing the magazine down, I turned to face him. His body was slightly hunched, his face tense. He no longer resembled the athletic, confident personage he’d once been, early in his career and early in my life. By now, a small paunch surrounded his stomach and a heavy gravity seemed to be pulling down the corners of his mouth.

“Sure,” I replied, wondering vaguely if I’d done something wrong. A trickle of adrenaline coursed through my veins. He beckoned for me to follow him into his bookshelf-lined library, the room he’d planned when our house had been designed a decade before. The navy blue, brown, and maroon hues of the book covers seemed to call out from the wooden shelves. Each time I entered, I felt overwhelmed by the world’s knowledge of science, history, and math inside those pages.

Dad paused as I walked past and pulled the sliding door shut, the soft metallic whirr of its rollers filling the air until wood contacted wood with a small hollow pop. I sat down on a straight-backed chair he’d placed near his desk, close to the tangle of file folders, syllabi, and lecture notes crowding its surface. Dad’s downward gaze and the quiver in his voice told me that our talk would not be about my freshman year or minor issues at home. As he cleared his throat, I clenched.

“Steve,” he began, “there are sometimes experiences, situations in life that are, well, difficult to understand.” To my surprise he was fumbling for words, far different from his usual orations on philosophy and science. “What I mean is this: Perhaps it’s time you heard about some events from my history.” He paused. “There were times when I wasn’t fully rational.”

As he continued speaking time slowed. Worlds passed before my eyes as fast as I could process them. From his occasional talks with me when I was young, I knew of the Hinshaw family’s tribulations and achievements. But something had always been missing, especially surrounding his strange disappearances, when he would vanish for weeks or months at a time. Nothing had ever been said.